From the course: DaVinci Resolve: Software Features and Workflows

What is an XML? - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

From the course: DaVinci Resolve: Software Features and Workflows

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What is an XML?

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- Let's start our XML workflow discussion by talking about what the heck is an XML. It's actually a little easier to show you than to talk about it, so let's take a look. But we're going to start by looking at what is the equivalent of an XML, which is a website. So let's take a look. I've loaded up the Black Magic website, and I'm going to go up into the develop menu here and show Page Source. And what pops up here is HTML. And HTML is nothing but a marked up description of this website. And it has all sorts of rules that it follows. For instance, we've got an H3 here. So this is an H3 tag that opens up the H3 headline. Then you've got a bunch of text in here, and then you've got an H3 tag that closes the headline. This is remarkably similar to what an XML is. I'm going to quit out of this. Let's take a look at our exercise files that I've provided to you. We're going to open up the XMLs and I'm going to right-click on this XML that I provided to you. Open with text edit. And when I open this up, and let's expand this out so it's nice and large, this looks a heck of a lot like HTML, where I've got lots of different declarations that open. You've got an asset that gets described in here, and then it closes. And then, within each of these assets, you get things like the name of the movie. You get things like the format. So format equals R0 tells DaVinci Resolve that this is a very specific codec and it understands what R0 is. Has video one probably means yes. Duration in terms of file length. So there's all sorts of metadata in here that goes through and describes not only all of the assets in your timeline, but it actually talks about shot numbers and what shot comes first in your timeline, what's the next shot in your timeline, what track is it on? There's all sorts of this data that's in here. So it's actually a very simple text document that follows certain rules. And the thing about following rules is different pieces of software have different rules that they follow. Imagine that, and this happens, imagine that in Chrome, there's one set of rules for HTML that it reads, but you need to write a separate set of rules for Safari. That has to happen sometimes. The same webpage looks different depending on the browser you're looking at. Well, what happens when it comes with XMLs, they don't degrade gracefully like they do on a webpage. What happens is, either Resolve will be able to read it or Premiere will be able to read it, or it can't. It's one or the other. The other thing, too, that you're going to find is Premiere Pro is using the Final Cut Pro 7 XML language version five, which is literally a decade old. Premiere Pro has not updated its export of XMLs in a decade, which means there are all sorts of brand new features in Premiere Pro. You think about where Premiere Pro was 10 years ago. Think about it where it is today. Completely different piece of software, yet it's still using the same XML language it used a decade ago, which means there are a ton of features in it that just don't translate into the XML. That's different than Final Cut Pro. The modern version of Final Cut Pro, what used to be called Final Cut Pro 10, has its own XML flavor, its own language. And Final Cut Pro 10 has multiple versions of its XML language that keep it up to date. So literally every year, there's a new flavor of XMLs that it exports, and the cool thing about DaVinci Resolve is they stay up to date with Final Cut Pro. So typically, between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, if you're going to have problems, it's going to be more with Premiere because the Final Cut Pro and Resolve integration with that XML workflow is much more tight, much more current, much more up to date.

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